Classical music has a lot to learn

In June and July 1945 Yehudi Menuhin performed at camps for “displaced persons” – Holocaust survivors – including outside where the demolished Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had stood. He was deeply shocked by what he saw; yet in 1947 he returned to Germany to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by the recently de-Nazified Wilhelm Furtwängler. Menuhin was the first Jewish musician to perform in post-World War II Germany, explaining that he did so in order to support the rehabilitation of German music and to help heal the spirit of the German people. 

My header photo shows Menuhin playing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 in 1966 with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by the now fashionably-reviled Herbert von Karan. The Jerusalem Cinematheque - Israel Film Archive describes that collaboration as an example of how "how music can still contribute to reconciliation today".

Coincidentally, or possibly not, both Menuhin and Karajan were yoga practitioners. Menuhin studied with the Indian yoga guru BKS Ivengar and Karajan with the German Jesuit priest and Zen master Father Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle. When the celebrated teacher of vipassanā meditation S.N. Goenka spoke at the Millenium World Peace Summit at the United Nations in New York in 2000 he explained that "Rather than converting people from one organised religion to another organised religion, we should try to convert people from misery to happiness, from bondage to liberation, and from cruelty to compassion".

Classical music today has a lot to learn.

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